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Sunday, June 8, 2008

Sunday Salon: Family Reading

"There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world.Love of books is the best of all."— Jacqueline Kennedy

Reading is not just something that I do in the evening after the kids are in bed. I was raised in a family of readers, married a reader, and am trying to raise another generation of readers. From the time we brought our firstborn home, we've been reading to our kids. We are a homeschooling family, and our approach to just about every subject is literature-based. What I'm saying is: we read a lot around here. Heard daily around our house is this question: What are you reading now?

Today, here are the answers:

The Firstborn, age 15, just finished a John Steinbeck marathon and has now moved onto H.P. Lovecraft.

The Princess, age 10, is reading Understood Betsy, and we are reading through the Little House on the Prairie series together again.

The Rascal, age 7, is reading all kinds of street signs and store signs; in other words, he is emerging into the realm of the written word, making daily strides. The last book he read by himself was Danny and the Dinosaur, and Dr. H. is reading through the Harry Potter series with him for the first time.Dr. H., having just finished a rather ponderous biography of Thomas Jefferson, is now reading HP and the Deathly Hallows for approximately the 812th time.

And this week for me: I finished Ami McKay's The Birth House and gave it a lukewarm review here. I'm more than halfway through Sue Miller's The Senator's Wife and am enjoying it very much. I picked up that and a couple of other books off the library's new arrivals shelves last week: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhuma Lahiri; A Beginning, A Middle, and An End by Avi (it's a kids' book on writing); and Deborah Weisgall's The World Before Her. I plan to read these three before I tackle my new stack of books. And then comes the ethical dilemma: do I add these library acquisitions to my TBR list even though they weren't really on my TBR list? What would you do?

I have recently discovered a love of historical fiction thanks to my boss. She introduced me to Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, and I'm halfway through the second book... I forgot just how much I love to read :)

What a lovely post! I loved it! When I was your youngest daughters age, I also read the Little House on the Prarie books. My aunt gave me the entire collection one Christmas and I held them very dear. Unfortunatly I don't have them anymore (30 yrs later) and I regret that. I almost picked up THE SENATORS WIFE several times, but it never makes it home with me. I'll be anxious to read your review once you've finished. Thanks for stopping by my blog. I'm going to try to rid myself of the guilt about my reading time. I would rather read than pretty much anything. Take care!

And, what ethical dilemma? What good is a TBR list if you're not going to add new books to it? Maybe that's why I don't keep a TBR list; or maybe I do, but I call it my "books to look for" list. Doesn't imply actually ever reading any of them...